Former Longmont businessman seeks to impart lessons

Local resident Mark Hopkins has recently written a book called "Shortcut to Prosperity: 10 Entrepreneurial Habits and a Roadmap for an Exceptional Career". (Lewis Geyer/Times-Call)
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LEWIS GEYER
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LONGMONT -- Former local Mark Hopkins said his children, as much as anything, inspired him to write his first book.

"This is the book I wish I would've had 20, 25 years ago, when I was getting started," said Hopkins, whose book -- "Shortcut to Prosperity: 10 Entrepreneurial Habits and a Roadmap for an Exceptional Career" -- officially goes on sale Jan. 1.

Hopkins founded Peak Industries in Longmont in 1996 with about 10 people and grew it to 300 employees and $75 million in annual revenue, eventually selling it to multinational corporation Delphi for $44 million. That put him in a position where he could be choosy about what he did or didn't do professionally.

But he never left the business world and, as he watched his kids -- now 20 and 22 -- grow into adulthood, he got the notion that maybe he should be "shouting some stuff back to the next generation, saying, 'Hey, I learned some stuff, and it's some really good stuff.'"

Growing something from nothing

Hopkins, who has engineering degrees from Cornell and Stanford, worked in the corporate world for Hewlett-Packard and Emerson Electric. It was while working at HP in the 1980s that he met his wife, Jenny, an event he describes as "winning the lottery."

"In my book, I talk about business partners and life partners," Hopkins said. "Jenny was the enabler for me to start Peak Industries."

The couple's kids were small at the time, and leaving a well-paying job to launch a start-up is always a risky proposition. But Jenny encouraged him to follow his dream. Without her support, he wouldn't have made that critical, and life-changing, decision, Hopkins said.

Shaking up the status quo is addressed in the first part of his book, where he talks about finding your passion in life and then having the courage to take chances to pursue that passion.

Hopkins started Peak Industries as a plastic parts manufacturer but learned relatively early on that it wasn't a business model that would keep the company growing. So it evolved into making more technologically complex products, and ultimately it got to where Peak wasn't just making parts designed to go into bigger products; it was making the products themselves.

The company really found its niche in the medical device industry, building kidney dialysis machines, oxygen concentrators and blood coagulation analyzers. That led Delphi to come calling in 2004.

Hopkins hadn't been looking to sell, but he did see it as a way to pay down the large bank debt he had accumulated. He left the company soon after the sale.

Incidentally, Delphi later sold off the medical device portion of its business and it's now Spartan Medical, employing many of the same people who used to work with him at Peak, Hopkins said.

"The corporate culture that we put together has survived through several transactions and continues to operate as an outstanding unit today, and that's a tribute to the people who are there," he said.

After he left Peak, Hopkins and his wife started a nonprofit foundation, Catalyst, to support their philanthropic interests, and Crescendo Capital Partners, a Boulder-based investment house. They became minority investors in a handful of companies and majority owners of Centennial-based American Medical Sales and Repair, which Jenny Hopkins has been running the past couple of years.

Meanwhile, Mark Hopkins has been working on his book. He put some basic ideas he wanted to impart down on paper and located a publisher who found merit in them.

"I didn't want to write this if it wasn't going to get published," he said.

Lessons to be learned

Jenny has been an integral partner in both his personal and professional life, and that's a major focus of the latter portion of his book.

"With the right business partners or life partners, you can achieve almost anything," he said. "But with the wrong ones, it makes it almost impossible to do anything."

The middle portion, "Develop An Unfair Advantage," is about learning some fundamental steps people should follow in pursuing their dreams.

"Once you figure out what you're passionate about, the middle (part) is about beating down the doors," Hopkins said.

Anecdotes about other people are sprinkled liberally throughout the book because he thinks they provide valuable lessons, Hopkins said.

"Every single one of them had to figure out, on their own, stuff that's in this book," Hopkins said. "The purpose of this book is so that you don't have to figure it out on your own."

Hence the book's title, "Shortcut to Prosperity," although the title is a bit tongue in cheek, he said.

"There is no such thing as a shortcut to prosperity," Hopkins said. "It's a lot of freaking work."

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